Ask a Question and Bots

[micmed]

Bots continue to crawl "Ask a Question" on my products even though I have removed that Mod from the site.

www.thecablestation.com

[micmed]

Bump - Any suggestions?

[mprough]

Open your tpl_product_info_display.php

Find is you are using the button....

   <div id="askQuestion" class="biggerText">
   <?php echo '<a href="' . zen_href_link(FILENAME_ASK_A_QUESTION, 'products_id='
   . $_GET['products_id']) . '">' .
   zen_image_button(BUTTON_IMAGE_ASK_A_QUESTION, BUTTON_ASK_A_QUESTION_ALT) .
   '</a>'; ?></div>

Change to

   <div id="askQuestion" class="biggerText">
   <?php echo '<a href="' . zen_href_link(FILENAME_ASK_A_QUESTION, 'products_id='
   . $_GET['products_id']) . '" rel="nofollow">' .
   zen_image_button(BUTTON_IMAGE_ASK_A_QUESTION, BUTTON_ASK_A_QUESTION_ALT) .
   '</a>'; ?></div>
   <br />
   <br class="clearBoth" />

Then add this to your robots.txt for Google and Yahoo

User-agent: Googlebot 
/index.php?main_page=ask_a_question&products_id=*

User-agent: Slurp 
/index.php?main_page=ask_a_question&products_id=*

~Melanie

[micmed]

Melanie, the problem is that I have removed all of that already but Google and others are still crawling my site as if AAQ is still installed.
This is typical of what I see on Who is Online:
Session ID:
Host: crawl-66-249-70-102.googlebot.com
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
/index.php?main_page=ask_a_question&products_id=2106

[mprough]

The code suggestion I gave you removes nothing..... It adds a nofollow on the link.

The robots.txt adds the wild card crawl blocking for the ask a question pages.


Then, if they still crawl you can add ask_a_question to your robots skip definition in your meta_tag.php

~Melanie

[micmed]

The code suggestion I gave you removes nothing..... It adds a nofollow on the link.

The robots.txt adds the wild card crawl blocking for the ask a question pages.


Then, if they still crawl you can add ask_a_question to your robots skip definition in your meta_tag.php

~Melanie

I understand the code suggestion, I just don't have that code on my site anymore.

I had ask_a_question blocked in robots.txt already.

I thought I had ask_a_question blocked in my meta_tags.php, but after checking it again it was missing. I have added that and see if that does the trick.

I still don't understand how they can crawl something that isn't there. I redo my sitemaps on a regular basis.

Thanks for all of your help.

[mprough]

Google will continue to crawl index & cached pages for up to 90 days... as they do not know it was removed or it was broken.

Log in to Google webmaster tools and remove the urls =-)
~Melanie

[micmed]

Thanks again.